Andy joined Dec 10, 2006

Scotch and Coffee founder, level designer, texture artist, model editor and voice actor. I'm always up for a voice acting job and will gladly do any lines you want to send to me. Also, I enjoy making video reviews for mods for Half-Life and Half-Life 2, so let me know if you want me to review one and I'll fit it in when I can.

From what short amount of this mod was playable, it was bad. Over 150MB download to start with, and it turns out that the majority of that is texture files. The "re-skin" mentioned in the description just appears to be a re-color of the sleeves on the HEV suit which must have taken all of 10 seconds to do.

From the first map alone it seems that none of the entities were even rotated after being placed, with all the enemies and corpses facing the exact same direction. The first map featured 2 killboxes with zombies and headcrabs and then the mod crashes at the first level transition.

While I do like the idea, the delivery is totally wrong. You establish that the mod is a tribute to mapping and how people need to take the time and effort to make their mods fun, yet you literally force the player through a series of terrible maps in order to make your point, and what's worse is that the resulting final map is the worst of the lot!

The melee weapon is not only clunky and slow, but makes no logical sense whatsoever.

You requested a terrible mod playthrough in my profile but quite frankly this isn't worth the effort.

I cannot fathom how Red Mesa managed to inspire a sequel, but here it is. Sitting neatly alongside the original in their own special layer of mod hell, Red Mesa 2 manages to increase the difficulty curve while becoming one of the most annoying experiences of my life.

First off, the sound effects. Right from the off the 2 enemies filling the first few levels, zombies and headcrabs, have had their sounds replaced by some pretty annoying vocals, and while I didn't understand what they were saying it was rather pleasant to shut them up... or not as it seems. On Hard mode there simply is not enough ammunition to take them all on and you have to run by most threads, their hideous garbling never out of earshot. Urgh.

The maps are no better than before, with horrendous architecture, no real design work put into them at all. You go from what I believe to be city streets, to caves, to a gman factory, all of them just huge open hallways with bad lighting. Well, at least it HAS lighting this time.

I think I finished it. 2 killboxes full of grunts and grenadiers with 35HP remaining throughout, before getting kicked to the menu. Also, a lack of autosaves meant I had to play through from the start after dying. That was unforgivable.

A whole new layer of crap has been discovered beneath what I used to think was the worst of it. This mod contains a few custom models which are simply the standard models that have had their textures butchered in MSPaint.

The maps are literally just boxes with enemies in. There is no plot, no theme, no consistency, no sense of place, no fun, not even a proper compile with lighting. I can quite honestly say that this map set is worse than my first ever attempt at mapping.

Well, I downloaded this expecting it to be bad and was unpleasantly surprised at just how bad it can get.

I don't quite understand, from a goldsource mapper's point of view, how some people manage to make maps with this many errors in them. A whole ruck of missing faces on simple brushwork, as well as some curious carving issues and jutting out brushes that look about 1 unit thick. Were these maps made using the smallest grid size? It's the only explanation I can come up with. Very poor practice all round.

Also, the stupidity of the AI in some sections is pretty incredible. The grunts are pretty smart enemies in terms of the GoldSource engine, yet here, the final engagement before the god awful ending was with 8 grunts, all of whom were trapped behind their desks by their own chairs. *Slowest clap ever*

The first engagement is impossible on hard mode with the machine gun (which looks like an M26... which is a shotgun but whatever). I simply ran through it. There is no way that you can take on the choppers, and judging by the number of scripted deaths that feature in this mod, I dare say it's intentional.

No fun whatsoever, especially during the slow cutscenes spliced in throughout.